Valve Corporation

Valve Corporation is an entertainment software company founded in 1996 by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington in Kirkland, Washington. They were both previously with Microsoft. Valve's debut product, Half-Life, released in November 1998, has won more than 50 Game of the Year honors worldwide.

On 12 September 2003, the company launched the digital distribution platform Steam. Steam's launch and the question of licenses for cyber cafes resulted in a dispute with Valve's publisher at the time, Vivendi Universal (as owner of Sierra), which was resolved in April 2005 in Valve's favor, with all their future titles being self-published from that moment on. Steam would gradually gain traction as the most popular digital distribution service for PC games by the late 2000s, for both Valve's and third-party titles.

All of the company's titles from 1998 to mid-2004 ran on the in-house GoldSrc engine until it was succeeded by the Source engine with the release of Counter-Strike: Source in 2004. Valve then used the Source engine for all of their titles until the engine was succeeded by Source 2 in 2015.

Their franchises include the Half-Life / Portal universe, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead and DotA (except the original).

Aside games and engines, Valve has developed a Linux distribution named SteamOS (as of 2013), Steam Machine and Steam Controller hardware (2015-2019; again in 2026), virtual reality set families Valve Index (as of 2019) and Steam Frame (as of 2026), and the Steam Deck handheld device (as of 2022).

From January 2008 to June 2009, Valve owned the studio Turtle Rock Studios (then renamed to Valve South) to develop Left 4 Dead, after which the studio was closed, then re-established independently from Valve in February 2010. In November 2012, Valve acquired Star Filled Studios. In January 2017, Valve acquired Impulsonic. In April 2018, Valve acquired Campo Santo Productions.